Interview: Krystle Mullin, Toronto Poetry Slam Team @ The Grad Club, Friday
“I knew that I couldn’t write about how red the robin’s breast was— and I’m not dissing poetry like
that, but for me, it was like, ‘I guess I’m not a writer because I can’t write about how beautiful the ice is when it freezes, but I can write about Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston breaking up.’”
And while countless robins may be feeling a little less red-breasted as a result, Krystle Mullin has done
well at doing her thing. The Queen’s graduate returns to The Grad Club on Friday night with the Toronto Poetry Slam Team, on their way to competing at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.
Poetry slams are competitive events where poets are judgedon performance and content by randomly selected audience (usually five), who give scores between one and 10. Poems cannot exceed three minutes.
The highest and lowest scores are dropped and the middle scores are added, making 30 the maximum
possible score. Larger events eliminate poets over several rounds before selecting a winner.
The Toronto team, selected based on their performances at three slams this summer, is rounded out by Amanda Hiebert, Leviathan and Spencer Butt. Team alternate Truth Is and coach Gypsy Eyes will also perform in Kingston. At the festival, the Toronto team will compete against seven other teams from across Canada.
“This is not your grandmother’s poetry,” Mullin said. “This is intense, in-your-face, ‘did they just
say what I think they just said?’ It’s not ‘let’s sip some tea and listen to someone read,’ it’s ‘let’s get
some Jack Daniels on the rocks and yell and holler and scream … Basically, slam poetry is the Jack
Daniels on the rocks of all poetry and writing.” Mullin, who completed an undergraduate and master’s degree in English at Queen’s, didn’t start slamming until after graduation.
“In my fourth year at Queen’s I performed a lot … I helped open the Agnes once with a show. This
woman saw me perform, and she was from New York, and she said ‘You should really look into slam
poetry.’ And I didn’t really know what that was. I looked it up on the Internet, but it seemed to be mostly based in the States. So I just kinda set it in the back of my mind, because I’m not going to drive to New York to throw a poem down for three minutes.
“In March, when I got back from Europe, I’m reading a NOW Magazine and it says ‘Toronto
Poetry Slam tonight.’ What? What is that?” Mullin competed that night after learning the rules from another audience member—Toronto team coach Gypsy Eyes—and made it to the final round.
Mullin performed often at Queen’s, even though she didn’t know how to identify her own work.
“My writing has always been rooted in a kind of musicality. I like rhythm, I’m really into rap and
hip-hop—I’m from Brampton, so that kind of makes sense—and I’ve always really loved the way that
words can have a beat … I had no idea what I was doing—I just knew that I really liked talking really fast all the time, and making these random rhymes and assessments and puns …
“The Kingston community— Queen’s especially—was totally open to the difference and experience of it. I ha d professors, specifically Elizabeth Greene, who were so ive of it …
“[Queen’s] was the perfectcommunity to want to do something a little off-kilter.”
Greene even went so far as calling Mullin “the next great Canadian beat poet.” Mullin has also published written work and said she has little trouble determining whether a piece is meant for the page or the stage. “A lot of the time something will come to me and I’ll know right away that it’s a performance piece … For example, one of my good friends just got out of the hospital and had a ton of problems with her stomach, and has talked a lot about how she feels very invaded by the doctors.
“And a line came to me from her perspective: ‘Everyone at Mount Sinai Hospital has seen my vagina.’
That to me is really a spoken word piece. I don’t see that as a book, I don’t see it in the Norton Anthology of Literature—I see myself saying that on stage and getting a reaction out of people. My written work is based on what I did in school, writing about different writers, like fictional poems on Keats and Woolf and Shakespeare …
“That’s not to say you can’tbe academic on stage, I think you certainly can, and slam poets are the best I’ve met at using grammar and puns and metaphor … because they know the rules well enough that they can abandon them whenever they want.”
Mullins counts among her inspirations d’bi.young and fellow team member Amanda Hiebert, “who’s been slamming for five years, and she can string words together like tinsel … She is one of those people you can meet and in three seconds feel intimidated, awe-inspired and want to go have a beer with her and shoot the shit.” Mullins emphasized the community-oriented, participatory nature of slams.
“If anybody wants to get involved in slam poetry, they really should just do it … “At the end of the day, you’re getting a group of people to listen to you for three minutes, and the way our world’s going right now, that seems like a really great thing. Because people aren’t listening to you, and we’re trying to bring that back.”
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The Toronto Poetry Slam Team’s performance starts at 9 p.m. at The Grad Club on Friday night. Cover is $5. The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word will take place at various venues in Toronto from Oct. 11-14. The Festival’s female honoree for 2006 is Queen’s writer-inresidence Lillian Allen.
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